dresden

Certainly, one feature that would improve my FM experience greatly right now is "Go on holiday, but stop when a player is unhappy". Because right now I want to skip 2 weeks of pointless email dross, but if one player wanted a playing time meeting at that point you'd come back to a transfer crisis. In other words, the email/meeting bloat is so bad that the most helpful 'feature' would be to help skip most of it. There are many different ways to simulate a football manager. The game already decides not to simulate other aspects because they wouldn't be fun or would be too different a game. Take player happiness. We know that managing players' feelings is a huge part of the modern manager's job. Fine. But as a customer, I don't enjoy their solution of repeatedly clicking 4 submenu buttons to pass on a generic 'well done' every other week hundreds of times per playthrough - especially because there's not much ingame feedback that makes you feel that something has changed in your playthrough because you have a hard-ass reputation or your players all have crybaby personalities, etc. It just feels like slamming the frowning face in an airport satisfaction terminal again and again.

I agree so much with this that I've reset my login to post (been playing & reading for years but never really posting here). It's not just one feature or another, but it's been a consistent general trend last few years: more meetings, almost none of them any fun at all. If SI say that X feature is too hard / costly and can't happen for a while, alright, that's one thing - but it's another thing to see resources & strategy actively go into beefing up FM as a soul-crushing work simulator. Each year I've become more and more used to simply ignoring various features, many of them new, to retain/improve my playing experience. No press conferences ever. No tunnel interviews ever. Skip reading 90% of the emails in the inbox. And make no mistake, this isn't coming from the typically "casual" segment of the player base - people like me are people who've played FM for a long time and often spend a lot of time learning the ins and outs of the game, people who aren't wanting FM Lite or whatever it's called. It's got nothing to do with 'streamlining' or 'making it easier to understand', it's about the fact that these meetings and emails usually don't add anything useful or fun. I'm fine with playing a difficult and complex RPG, for example, but not if it wants me to file tax forms to sell my loot.